Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1141 Scott Adams： What We Will Remember From Debate, How the Republic Could Collapse, Rittenhouse Slander

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody come on in, come on in gather round. It's time for a coffee with Scott Adams,

00:00:16.560 best part of the day. Is it good? Oh it's good. You want to see what it looks like out my window?

00:00:23.160 Total whiteout conditions, that is unhealthy air quality right there. Forest fires still

00:00:34.320 putting a lot of smoke into my neighborhood. They're not very close to me but there are

00:00:39.420 so many fires that I can't go outside. But we don't need to go outside yet. What we need is

00:00:49.920 a simultaneous sip. And it doesn't take much to enjoy it. Not really. All you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen drink or flask or vessel of any kind.

00:00:59.920 Interestingly my traffic is very small today. Something's going on. And you should fill that

00:01:11.720 vessel with coffee. Or your favorite beverage. And join me for the dopamine hit of the day. The thing that makes everything better. Simultaneous sip. Happening right now. Go.

00:01:26.720 Ah. Well, I think that cleared the air quality a little bit. I'll probably have to drink some more to fix it entirely.

00:01:37.720 All right. Let's talk about all the things. The big mystery of the day is, now this is interesting. My traffic is roughly half of what it was yesterday. I wonder why that is. Is there something going on today?

00:01:59.580 Your Twitter is down? Twitter isn't working? Somebody's saying? Oh, it could be that the automatic notification didn't go up on Twitter. That's what it was. No notification. All right. Well, let us enjoy those of us who are here.

00:02:20.640 All right. One of the big questions is, what's up with President Trump not forcefully disavowing the racist groups? With emphasis on the word forcefully, because he actually did say he would disavow them. He's disavowed them in the past multiple times. But when asked in the debate, as you all know, he did not.

00:02:46.080 So Periscope didn't post to Twitter. Okay. So it looks like there's some kind of issue going on. But here's a hypothesis I want to put out there.

00:03:03.080 President Trump, and I think I wrote about this in Win Bigly. President Trump is very savvy about media stuff. Would you agree that he is one of the most experienced, maybe the most experienced media personality, you know, just about of all time?

00:03:22.980 You know, who has been interviewed more times than President Trump? Not many people. And there's a trick that he would see coming that I would also see coming, because like him, I get interviewed a lot.

00:03:37.220 And here's the trick. If somebody says to you, will you disavow X? And you think to yourself, well, that group that you mentioned, this group X, they're a bad group, I can easily disavow them.

00:03:54.360 So let's say it was the KKK. How hard would it be to disavow the KKK? Not hard. Not hard at all. Socially, socially acceptable. Easy to do. I disavow them.

00:04:09.220 What would happen? What would be the next thing that would happen if the president disavowed the KKK, not in a speech that he's giving, this is important, but rather in a give and take scenario?

00:04:24.360 Now, if he's giving a speech, he can just disavow all he wants, and he doesn't have to take questions if he doesn't want to. And he can get his message out there and say, yep, I disavowed the KKK, and then walk away. That's all good. No problem, right?

00:04:40.620 But what if somebody asks him to disavow somebody? Well, there are two problems here. Number one, it looks weak when people force you to say stuff. Think about it.

00:04:53.580 How do you look when somebody randomly can make you say stuff, literally make you say words? Okay, I'm going to make you say these words. I disavow whoever. And then you say the words. Who's in charge? Is it the person who repeated what they were told to repeat? Or is it the person who forced them to say it in public?

00:05:16.160 It's a power thing. It's a power thing. So that's the first thing you need to know. The president seemingly never, I can't think of an exception, he never gives up the power position.

00:05:30.840 And the power position is who's making somebody say something. It's not the person who's just conforming. So that's the first problem. It does look weak.

00:05:42.420 Now, but you say to me, but Scott, yeah, I get what you're saying. You can't just say what other people tell you to say, that would look weak.

00:05:50.100 But come on. Any fool can disavow a racist group, white supremacist. How hard is that? That's an exception. Clearly, you can do that. No problem at all. Right? No problem.

00:06:04.540 What would happen if he had? Game it out. Now, this is the sort of thing you learn if you have media training, as I do.

00:06:15.860 I literally have training with a real expert who sat with me and taught me how to deal with media interviews.

00:06:24.020 The next thing that would happen is you'd get another question. Okay. Okay. So you've disavowed white supremacists.

00:06:32.640 Very good. Very good. Do you also disavow the Proud Boys?

00:06:39.160 Okay. Now it's getting a little harder, right? Because if you don't know exactly who the Proud Boys are,

00:06:46.160 and I confess I didn't really know until this morning. You know, I've even been interviewed by

00:06:53.520 Gavin McGinnis back in 2016. So I knew that there was something called the Proud Boys. I knew they existed.

00:06:59.800 I've even communicated with some of them. People have messaged me on social media, etc.

00:07:05.020 But I didn't know who they were or what they were. I vaguely knew that they, you know, were sort of

00:07:11.140 like to fight or something and say politically incorrect things.

00:07:18.000 But are they a white supremacist group? Well, they would say no. And you know what argument they would give

00:07:27.100 for not being a white supremacist group? Well, that the black members of Proud Boys would be a pretty 0.95

00:07:34.280 good argument that they're not a white supremacist group. Because it's hard to explain why the white

00:07:41.380 supremacist group would have black members, but they do, and other ethnicities as well.

00:07:49.140 But have they ever said something, let's say about Islam or about women? Have they ever said anything

00:07:57.260 that the president would need to put some distance from? Probably yes. Probably yes. But he doesn't know

00:08:04.640 exactly what they've said. So does he disavow them? Well, suppose he does. Let's say he does.

00:08:11.720 So he disavows the Proud Boys. What's the next thing that'll happen? Do you disavow Breitbart?

00:08:22.400 Breitbart, a publication that has been blamed by some people for saying things that, you know,

00:08:29.640 other people have considered Islamophobic or racist or whatever. What does he do? He's already

00:08:36.840 disavowed the easy one, white supremacy. And he, you know, hypothetically, let's say, he is sort of

00:08:46.100 tentatively disavowed the Proud Boys, just in case. Don't know what's in there. Nobody's quite sure what

00:08:52.240 they're about. I'm not entirely sure. But let's say he disavowed them. Now, what about Breitbart?

00:08:57.980 Because lots of people on the left say bad things about Breitbart? Does he have to disavow them?

00:09:06.320 Let's say he did. Now, it's not going to happen, right? In a million years, Trump would never disavow

00:09:12.220 a publication that tends to be friendlier to him. But suppose he did. What happens next?

00:09:19.620 Does he have to disavow Joe Rogan? Because remember, when Spotify took on Joe Rogan's program,

00:09:30.160 they said, oh, there's several of these episodes we're going to have to delete, because they seem,

00:09:36.080 you know, too friendly to white supremacists or whatever they said. Spotify's employees apparently

00:09:42.380 are rebelling. So then what does he do? Does President Trump disavow Joe Rogan?

00:09:48.680 Because they would be able to make an argument. I think it's a bullshit argument. But somebody

00:09:56.520 could make an argument. Well, he associated with, by interviewing, McGinnis. There you go. He

00:10:05.460 actually interviewed Gavin McGinnis. Joe Rogan interviewed me. What about me? Would President

00:10:13.160 Trump have to disavow me? Because I've been on Joe Rogan's show? Joe Rogan talked to Gavin

00:10:21.320 McGinnis. Gavin McGinnis was the founder of Proud Boys. Where does it stop? Now, even if you disagree

00:10:29.760 with my examples that are imperfect, the point is, the moment you accept the frame that I'm going to

00:10:38.160 make you say stuff, and you're going to have to keep saying stuff, because I'm going to keep giving

00:10:44.080 you stuff to say. And the moment you say, I don't know if I want to keep saying the things that you're

00:10:50.340 telling me to say, you're racist. It's over. Now, the president has taken the position, you've seen it

00:10:59.920 for a long time, that he just doesn't like to get pushed around. It's not a good look. And he just

00:11:06.680 prefers not to. So I think that when you saw the hesitation, the first time was when Jake Tapper

00:11:14.760 asked the president to disavow David Duke in the KKK. And you saw the president hesitate. And he tried to

00:11:23.520 get a sense of who else he would have to disavow. I think that was the source of the hesitation.

00:11:31.620 Now, of course, I'm speculating, because I'm not inside his head. I can't know what he was thinking.

00:11:36.820 But based on my own experience with media interviews, I would have seen that trap. So if

00:11:44.700 I'd been asked that question, as I was answering it, and this is hard to do, it's hard to have a

00:11:50.360 separate thought that's complicated while you're talking on camera to millions of people, right?

00:11:56.740 It's very hard to do. So you're trying to process, okay, if I answer this question, what does that

00:12:02.100 lead to? What's the question that naturally follows that? Am I setting a precedent? Am I walking into a

00:12:08.980 trap? Is this one of those, do you still beat your spouse kind of questions? So I feel as if the

00:12:17.560 president has found himself, you know, planning a couple of moves ahead, and not knowing where it

00:12:24.820 would go. And I think that that cost him, because he would have been better off just going with it

00:12:30.200 and then changing the subject. And like I said, there's a big difference between something he

00:12:35.640 could say in the speech, because he can say everything he wants to say and nothing extra,

00:12:40.500 and then just walk away. But when somebody is doing a back and forth, you know what the next

00:12:46.060 question is going to be? They're going to extend this until they trap you.

00:12:53.360 How about this as an answer? I often think about how to answer this, you know, if I'm the president,

00:13:00.800 how would I answer it? And I think I might go something like this to avoid the trap. You know,

00:13:08.240 do you disavow the KKK? Let's say that's the question. Here's an answer I'm playing with

00:13:14.420 as a better way to go. Instead of disavowing people, disavow, let's say, opinions. So you could

00:13:25.540 easily say, I disavow every racist viewpoint, no matter where it comes from. Then what does the

00:13:33.140 interviewer say? So are you explicitly disavowing the KKK? And then the president could say,

00:13:40.460 does the KKK have any racists in it? I'm disavowing all racism, no matter where it is. So, you know,

00:13:50.020 if you want to make a list, ask yourself if there are any racists in there. Because if there's any

00:13:55.160 racists in your list, I'm disavowing them. Well, are you specifically, can you say you're disavowing the

00:14:01.940 KKK? Well, I've already put them on a terrorist, domestic terrorist list. So that's pretty disavowed,

00:14:10.620 wouldn't you say? So Twitter's down, people are telling me. It's interesting. Periscope's up,

00:14:17.480 but Twitter is down. It looks like people figured out that I'm broadcasting because the traffic is back

00:14:23.800 up. Anyway, I think I'd go after the thought of racism and disavow that wherever it is.

00:14:34.800 I saw that one of the Trump campaign websites had 33 false or misleading claims that Joe Biden

00:14:45.180 allegedly made at the debates. 33 false or misleading claims. That's a lot of misleading claims, isn't

00:14:57.020 it? 33 in an hour and a half. Now, here's my only point. Did President Trump say 33 false or misleading

00:15:08.740 things? I don't know what the exact count is, but probably, right? But here's the thing. The people

00:15:17.120 who most dislike President Trump, if you asked them one year ago, name what's the worst thing about

00:15:25.800 Trump, they would probably say he lies. Wouldn't you agree? That would be the number one thing that

00:15:34.220 would come out of people's mouth. At least that's my experience. Now, sometimes they'll go with

00:15:38.740 the racism thing first, but I would say at least number two is going to be that he lies. He's

00:15:45.420 20,000 lies. He lies, lies, lies, lies. But why don't they say that about Joe Biden? Does Joe Biden lie

00:15:53.880 less than President Trump? I don't see any evidence of that. It looks like Joe Biden lies continuously,

00:16:02.480 like just full-on, almost nothing but a wall of lies. Probably 70% lies to 30% truth, something like

00:16:12.220 that. Now, why is it that we don't think of Biden as a liar? Now, some of you do if you're Trump

00:16:19.620 supporters, but why don't Democrats see Biden as a liar when he's wall-to-wall lies all the time?

00:16:27.560 And I think it has to do with whatever your brand is. You know, once you've decided that somebody is

00:16:34.360 a brand, you just sort of stick with it. I'll give you an example. When I was a kid, it was considered

00:16:41.520 a truism that Volkswagen Beetles were unusually reliable. It was something about them being built

00:16:48.480 simply or whatever. But the thought was that they're very reliable, these VW bugs, more reliable

00:16:56.700 than any other vehicle. But yet, when I would drive around town, if I saw a broken-down car by the side

00:17:05.040 of the road, the percentage of times it was a Volkswagen Beetle was really, really high, to the

00:17:12.180 point where you couldn't not notice it. There'd be like broken-down Volkswagen Beetles all over the

00:17:17.480 place, far more than any other car I ever saw. And yet, and yet, the reputation was it was the most

00:17:24.900 dependable car. There was no correlation between what you observed with your own eyes and what

00:17:32.520 everybody believed to be true. I think that was one of the first times I thought that the world is a

00:17:37.840 crazy place, because it was just so obviously not true that they were dependable. And it's so obviously

00:17:45.000 true that Biden is a gigantic liar. But one of the things you're seeing a little bit less

00:17:51.600 is that that's a reason for disliking Trump. Correct me if I'm wrong, and watch for this as we get closer

00:17:59.160 to election. I'll bet you that between now and election day, the complaint that Trump is a liar

00:18:06.100 will shrink. You'll still hear it. But the number of times they'll say it will be way less. And the

00:18:12.840 reason is, now they have something to compare him to. When it was just Trump versus whatever your ideal

00:18:19.780 idea, your ideal of a better candidate is, well, then it looks like Trump's a big liar, because he's

00:18:26.560 being compared to your ideal, honest candidate that doesn't really exist. But as soon as you get a real

00:18:31.960 one, you get a real candidate, it's Joe Biden, and you start counting up the lies, and it's 33 in 90

00:18:39.600 minutes, 33 lies in 90 minutes. How can you possibly say to yourself, with any kind of, you know,

00:18:47.480 intellectual integrity, how can you say, ah, I'm going to vote for Joe Biden, because I don't want a liar

00:18:54.420 for a president. I feel like that reason for voting for Biden just went away, because he lies

00:19:02.500 continuously. All right. Here's my take two days after the debate. When the debate is fresh, you have a

00:19:19.780 certain set of feelings, because you can remember a lot of the details. So there will be things that

00:19:25.060 feel like they're having an effect on you, because you remember them, they just happened, you're

00:19:30.640 thinking about it, it must be important, because you're thinking about it. But you get just a few

00:19:35.620 days away from it, and memories being what they are, you start forgetting slices of it. And you're

00:19:43.380 forgetting this, and you're forgetting that, and you're forgetting that. Pretty soon, there's not much

00:19:49.040 left of your memory. This is just normal way memories work. So what's left after a few days have

00:19:56.100 gone by, and there's lots more political noise and distractions, and suddenly, here's the memory that

00:20:02.640 you'll be left with from that debate. There was a contest to see who could bullshit the most,

00:20:10.020 and Trump dominated it. That's it. That's sort of what you'll remember, because that was the visual,

00:20:17.460 and it was sort of the overall theme and feeling you got. You can't forget how much Trump was trying

00:20:27.080 to dominate and talk over Biden, and how Biden was, he was doing a pretty good job of trying to fight

00:20:33.220 back. But it looked like a battle of bullies, because if you've ever watched Biden debate not

00:20:40.420 Trump, if you've seen past Biden debates, he's pretty bullying. But when you put him on the stage

00:20:48.020 with Trump, he's the lesser bully, and that's what you remember. So let me ask you this. Let's say you

00:20:53.980 were totally put off by Trump's aggressive, you know, not following the rules performance. Totally put

00:21:02.520 off by it. But separately, you have to make a decision about the following. One of those two

00:21:09.820 people, Biden or Trump, is going to fight for something on your side. So you have to pick one

00:21:17.320 of them to be on your team, to be a team leader. And once you pick them, they're going to go do some

00:21:21.820 fighting for you. So whatever they can get, whatever deals they can make, whatever advantages

00:21:27.860 they can get, that's going to accrue to you, because you picked them, they're on your team.

00:21:32.420 If the only thing you knew about them was that debate, who do you pick to get you some shit?

00:21:41.120 Right? You see it, right? You could hate everything about what Trump did on that stage. But if you said

00:21:50.160 to yourself, you can only pick one of them, and they have to go forth and get you some stuff.

00:21:54.560 It's a no-brainer. You're going to pick Trump every time, because he controlled the situation.

00:22:04.620 Even if you hated it, that's the guy you want on your team. If you're hiring a lawyer,

00:22:11.000 do you want the lawyer who's the most polite? No, you don't. You don't want the lawyer who's most

00:22:17.620 polite. You might want the lawyer who's polite to you. But when your lawyer is fighting the other team,

00:22:23.960 you don't want them to be nice, necessarily, I mean, unless there's some advantage to it. You want

00:22:29.740 them to be a killer. You want them to be a shark. So I got a feeling that people were not as put off

00:22:37.600 by the strongman performance, which is what it was. It was showing who had the most alpha energy.

00:22:46.020 And on that point, I saw just a great comment. So this is from Frances Martel, who's a Breitbart

00:22:58.700 International News Editor. And I'm assuming because she has some Spanish words in her profile 0.96

00:23:05.180 that she's Hispanic, which is important to the point. And she tweeted this,

00:23:10.300 My hottest take is that Hispanics like this debate, because this is how we engage each other

00:23:16.760 politically all the time. It isn't uncivil. It's just passionate. The pearl clutching about how

00:23:23.320 presidents aren't supposed to act like those people doesn't sit well with me. And apparently a number

00:23:29.880 of other people, not apparently, I saw the comments. And there were a lot of people from various,

00:23:36.760 let's say, interesting cultures who said, Oh, yeah, same here. Same here. That's that's like my

00:23:45.860 family. And they looked at it and thought to themselves, Oh, yeah, that's that looks just

00:23:51.440 like I would expect it to look. Why wouldn't it look like that? Of course, the president is

00:23:56.340 aggressive. Of course, he's talking over him. Of course, he's interrupting. How else do you do it?

00:24:01.760 That's exactly how a political conversation is supposed to look. Now, I don't have my own insight

00:24:09.700 into this. But there were a whole lot of people who agreed with it. So that's all I'm going to say.

00:24:15.680 You know, a lot of people agreed with it.

00:24:20.600 I saw Dan Bongino's take on the debate. And I thought it was a really strong one. So I'll repeat

00:24:30.400 it here, which is that it's a base election. In other words, nobody is trying to persuade somebody

00:24:37.420 else to vote from the other team. So so everybody is just trying to get their own people to show up.

00:24:43.620 And it's all about getting your own base to get off the couch or fill out the form and actually vote.

00:24:50.900 So that's the first thing. And as Dan points out, strategically, did Trump make a dent in Biden's

00:25:02.640 support by separating him from his far left? Well, I don't know, because a lot of those people are

00:25:09.820 going to say, well, you know, I'm still closer to Biden than I am to Trump. I don't like Trump.

00:25:15.720 So maybe. But what about the people who are sort of just not that excited about voting?

00:25:24.160 Maybe they would have. Maybe they wouldn't run on the fence. It's not a case that they would have

00:25:29.140 switched their vote to Trump, but rather they're just not going to show up and vote for Biden because

00:25:36.120 they're just not as excited. Maybe they were Bernie supporters and they feel like they were thrown

00:25:40.640 under the bus. So did the president make his point that the Biden supporters are not all on the same

00:25:49.200 page? I feel like he did. As Dan Bongino pointed out, I think he made that case and he made it well.

00:25:57.620 But what about the the problems that Trump gave himself by his, let's say, bad performance on the

00:26:05.340 question of disavowing white supremacy? Do you think that cost him any votes from his base?

00:26:14.940 And the answer is probably not, because there's nothing that happened in the debate that

00:26:21.540 Trump's supporters are not accustomed to. In other words, it's sort of more of the same.

00:26:28.940 Oh, OK, we we already know he doesn't like to be pushed into saying stuff.

00:26:32.880 We already know he doesn't like to be into apologizing, clarifying defense. He just likes

00:26:39.740 to play offense. And so that's what you get. Now, to his supporters, we've all seen the

00:26:47.720 compilation clips of him clearly and and and strongly disavowing white supremacy and racists and the KKK.

00:26:56.360 So if you're a supporter, you know that the claims against him are bullshit, even if you

00:27:02.820 understand that the way he handled the question was completely botched, which would be my take on

00:27:08.180 it. Now, my own take, he did lose my vote. I told you this yesterday. Personally, he lost my vote.

00:27:16.060 But I also have never haven't voted lately. So it's not like it's any big difference.

00:27:20.680 And and as I explained, losing my vote is just personal. It's just personal. It's not anything

00:27:29.200 I would try to talk you into. I would not try to talk you into it. I just spent way too much of my

00:27:35.520 own personal currency debunking that whole fine people hoax. I just wanted a little hand and I

00:27:42.740 didn't get it. It took it personally. All right. So that's just me. You don't need to follow that

00:27:49.780 model. I wouldn't encourage you to do it. So, yeah, the Bongino analysis, I feel is solid,

00:27:58.180 pretty solid. I think the president might have done nothing to hurt his base and probably hurt

00:28:07.200 Biden's base a little bit. That could matter. We'll see. The court packing question I thought

00:28:16.020 was interesting. And by the way, if you recorded Tucker Carlson's show from last night,

00:28:23.380 you got to watch that thing. You know, Tucker Carlson is probably one of the strongest opinion

00:28:30.180 shows on TV. Not probably. It's one of the strongest opinion shows. Best quality, most interesting,

00:28:37.800 you know, most creative takes on stuff, I would say. But last night's show was kind of a masterpiece.

00:28:45.140 It was one of the best shows I think he's ever had. And one of the points he talked about was the

00:28:51.020 importance of this court packing question that Joe Biden avoided. And I had not really thought it

00:28:58.560 through as much as, you know, Tucker, you know, fleshed it out a little bit. And here's the thing

00:29:05.160 that I was missing. The court packing question isn't just a little throwaway preference kind of a

00:29:13.660 thing. It is the end of the republic. And that was not obvious to me at first. And here's how it's the

00:29:22.200 end of the republic. If right now the republic depends on, you know, the equal branches having

00:29:30.880 their own power, so that the judiciary is somewhat independent from Congress, from the president,

00:29:37.440 so that they all have their individual powers. But what would happen if court packing became

00:29:43.440 acceptable? Because the first time it happens won't be the last time. It means that whoever's in

00:29:49.680 charge will just pack the court until there are 150 people in the court. But more likely,

00:29:56.180 and this is the scary part, there's a very possible scenario that goes like this.

00:30:07.640 Democrats win the presidency. Democrats win maybe even the Senate. And then Democrats pack the court.

00:30:17.420 What happens if Democrats have the court, Congress, and the presidency at the same time?

00:30:26.740 Well, under our current, you know, highly polarized situation, it would almost guarantee that they

00:30:35.900 would modify the system until they couldn't lose ever again. In other words, it would be everything

00:30:42.300 from jerry-rigging to changes in, you know, how many states there are in the union. They might accept,

00:30:52.040 let's say, accept Puerto Rico and Guam, turn them into Democrat strongholds. No, I think it was not Guam,

00:30:59.400 maybe it was D.C. So I think Puerto Rico and D.C. become states. They would both be Democratic states.

00:31:06.480 Democrats would control everything. That's it. You could very easily reach the point where we're a

00:31:13.680 one-party system, and we're this close to it. We're this close. All it would take was a good

00:31:20.940 election cycle this time. That's it. And once you have only one party, they can use the court to lock

00:31:28.760 themselves in because, you know, Republicans might try to challenge it and say, hey, you can't do this

00:31:34.680 or that because it's illegal. And then the court says, well, we're a bunch of Democrats, and we always

00:31:41.100 go Democrat. There it is. So we actually are this close to losing the republic. And the biggest part of 0.51

00:31:49.040 that is probably the court packing, if the court packing is allowed. And Joe Biden is not saying no to

00:31:56.140 it. He's actually open to it, apparently, because he's not saying no. So if that doesn't scare you,

00:32:03.860 it should. And here's a frame that I think would be useful for the president.

00:32:10.300 People like certainty more than they like improvement. This is a very important element of human

00:32:19.460 psychology. If you say, would you like something to be better? Everybody says yes. Well, of course,

00:32:25.540 I like improvement. But if you said, would you like improvement at the risk that there could be,

00:32:33.460 you know, it might go wrong? Well, then it's different. Then I'll say, depends where I am in

00:32:40.060 life and what's going on. Maybe I'll just be happy with where things are because the risk of trying to

00:32:46.060 improve it could blow the whole thing. Biden is the risky play. Here's why. You don't know what

00:32:53.780 you'll get. If you reelect President Trump, do you know what you'll get? Yes, you do. You totally know

00:33:03.660 what you'll get with President Trump. Because first of all, he has a very strong record of doing what he

00:33:09.160 told you he would do, or at least trying to do what he said he would do. That's kind of unique about

00:33:16.000 Trump. Is that you can really bank on what you expect him to at least try to do, right? He's going

00:33:25.000 to go hard at China. He's going to try to build a border wall. He's going to keep taxes low. Pretty

00:33:32.180 much everything about Trump, you kind of can predict. Will he continue to do things which his

00:33:38.940 critics will call racist? Of course. Will they actually be racist? Probably not. Probably not.

00:33:48.300 But you'll be accused of it, of course. So a second Trump term would look a whole lot like you expect

00:33:56.440 it would look. What would a Biden term look like? Number one, who's the president? You don't even know

00:34:05.080 who the president is. Number two, who's running Biden? Who's the power behind Biden? I'm not so

00:34:11.680 sure. If you get Biden, how much of the Green New Deal do you end up with, even if his intention is to

00:34:18.820 stick with the Biden Green Deal? You don't know. Because you don't know how powerful that wing of the

00:34:25.600 party will be. A Biden presidency is a complete unknown. You don't even know if you'll still have

00:34:32.620 a republic. Literally, you don't know if the republic would survive it, because packing the court is

00:34:40.780 sort of the end of the republic. That turns it into a, or could turn it into a one-party system.

00:34:49.460 So uncertainty is a big deal. There's continuing information about new testing stuff for coronavirus.

00:35:01.220 So I don't know too much about this. It was just a tweet today. Sheba Medical Center in Israel, I guess,

00:35:08.500 is testing a new antigen coronavirus test that could give you a result in two to 15 minutes.

00:35:14.780 So, and they're working on a, I guess they're working on a saliva-based test. So we're very close

00:35:21.320 to the super cheap saliva test, meaning that you can do it yourself. You don't need anybody to stick

00:35:27.900 anything up your nose. And I don't know how many different test companies are working on it,

00:35:34.000 but I'm guessing that the technology involved to make a saliva-based, cheap, no-equipment-needed

00:35:43.060 coronavirus test is understood. Because there are enough different entities working on it. It must be

00:35:49.900 something that people who deal in this field must know how to do. So we might be like a month away

00:35:57.900 from having massive amount of inexpensive testing, and then it's going to look good. So that's some

00:36:05.680 good news. There's a study out of India that could be really important. It says that 8% of infected

00:36:14.860 people accounted for 60% of new infections. So these would be the so-called super spreaders.

00:36:22.360 So the super spreaders, if you could somehow identify who was a super spreader, and you only

00:36:30.700 could take care of them and nothing else, that might take care of it. Because it's such an outsized

00:36:39.000 difference. And here's a question I have. Could you identify the super spreaders by their genes?

00:36:48.540 Is there a genetic DNA kind of correlation? Because suppose it turns out that in order to be a super

00:36:57.340 spreader, you would have to have, I don't know, some kind of lung situation or maybe a blood type.

00:37:04.880 I'm just, you know, spitballing here. There might be something about you that makes you more likely to

00:37:11.900 be a super spreader. Now it's possible that all that is, is you have a big lung capacity or you speak

00:37:18.040 loud. Maybe that's all it is. So maybe you couldn't find that in genetics. But what if you could?

00:37:26.040 What if you could actually find out that some people, even if they don't have the infection,

00:37:31.800 infection, if they did get the infection, they're the type of person who would become a super spreader?

00:37:38.080 That would be useful, wouldn't it? Because you could say to yourself, we don't have a ton of tests,

00:37:44.160 but let's make sure that the people who have a DNA propensity to be a super spreader, 0.94

00:37:50.020 let's make sure we test the crap out of those guys. Just test them every day,

00:37:55.520 you know, until we have enough tests to do everybody all the time.

00:37:58.560 So that's just a question. Here's a take that you won't see from people who have

00:38:07.340 better instincts for survival than I do. One of the benefits of these periscopes is that

00:38:16.520 I can say things that people don't say out loud. You ready? Here's something that somebody doesn't

00:38:23.160 say out loud too much for all the obvious reasons. How many children, let's say how many 10-year-old

00:38:30.740 children would you trade for how many 80-year-olds? Let's say you knew that the coronavirus was going

00:38:43.200 to take, let's say, five years off the age of a senior citizen, if they get it. But if the 10-year-old

00:38:51.280 can't go to school, can't live their regular life, you know, everything's shut down, what if they kill

00:38:58.980 themselves? Worst case scenario, right? Kid does themselves harm. Well, if a 10-year-old,

00:39:06.380 their life is ruined by the coronavirus in any way that causes a death, the number of years of life

00:39:13.940 that that 10-year-old had might be 80. So if a 10-year-old were to perish, they would lose 80 years

00:39:21.200 of life. If an 80-year-old dies, maybe they lose five years of life. So if you lost 16 80-year-olds,

00:39:32.140 it would be the same number of years of life as one kid. One kid would be the same number of years

00:39:39.220 of life as 16 80-year-olds. These, yeah, I'm just making up these numbers, but it's somewhere in that

00:39:45.640 range. Now, in public, you're supposed to say this, every life is precious. We don't value one life over

00:39:55.140 another. We don't treat anybody as expendable. And I agree with all of that. That's what you say in

00:40:03.660 public. What do you say in private? In private, you don't say that. There are things that you say

00:40:10.480 in public, and you should. Every life is equal. Everyone is respected. You're going to fight like

00:40:17.760 hell for every single life. That's what you say in public, and you should. But it's not what you think.

00:40:24.180 You don't think that privately. Privately, you know that the life of a child is just worth more than

00:40:31.780 the life of somebody who's 80. It's just a fact. And if you ask the 80-year-old, well, what do you

00:40:37.420 think? What do you think, 80-year-old? Do you think we should put you at a little more risk to save the

00:40:43.500 life of a kid, or at least give them a life that's worth living? The 80-year-old, most of them would say,

00:40:49.600 you know, maybe so. Maybe so. You know, I had a good run. So here's where I'm going with this.

00:40:57.620 I think Trump's instincts about opening the economy, which benefits the young at the expense 0.99

00:41:06.280 of the old, right? Opening the economy benefits the young and gives them something like a life,

00:41:13.580 something like a better education, you know, which affects their whole life. And maybe they don't,

00:41:19.980 you know, die from depression and suicide and drug addiction and all that other stuff.

00:41:24.340 I think the president is doing in public what every one of us thinks in private.

00:41:32.920 And that's one of the reasons he got elected, because he can say in public the things that

00:41:38.140 you can only say in private, and he's willing to do it. And I think that the president is very

00:41:45.700 close to the public in terms of the trade-off of the economy versus lives. Have you had any

00:41:53.160 conversation in your private life? Somebody says, my mom is 86. Her life is not expendable. Did I

00:42:01.740 disagree with that? Did I disagree with that? In public, every life is precious. But the reality is

00:42:10.860 sometimes you have to choose. And these choices are adult choices. It's not like you get to choose,

00:42:17.880 why don't we let them both live and have wonderful lives. Sometimes you don't have that choice.

00:42:23.500 Sometimes you just got to make a choice. And I think that the president's, his bias toward the young

00:42:30.860 is exactly where the public is. And I think that when I hear 200x thousand Americans died of coronavirus,

00:42:40.780 I still don't know one. Let me ask you here, how many of you have somebody close who died from

00:42:52.600 coronavirus? Because I wonder how deeply it's getting into the everyday public, the fact that

00:43:00.180 I've never met one. I don't know anybody, actually zero people that I know personally. I know people

00:43:06.520 who know people, but I don't actually still know anybody personally. So in the comments,

00:43:11.460 tell me if you know anybody who's died of coronavirus. And let's say that you did.

00:43:18.260 Let's say you did know somebody who wasn't a family member because you're way too biased about

00:43:23.160 family members. But let's say you knew an acquaintance who was 80 years old and died of the coronavirus,

00:43:32.340 virus. But the trade-off was that the economy got opened. Children could go to school. People

00:43:38.520 could live something closer to a real life. What do you think about that? If you had to make that

00:43:46.420 choice, which way would you go? Somebody says in the comments, I choose my kids over my mom.

00:43:56.260 Yup. Because you would choose your kids over yourself. Yeah, you would choose your kids over your mom.

00:44:02.060 That's absolutely true. And I have a feeling that the public is way closer to Trump in terms of

00:44:11.660 taking the risk of opening the economy. And also the risks about wearing masks and all that.

00:44:18.420 So here's the thing that the illegitimate media doesn't ever do. They don't really look at the

00:44:25.180 costs and the benefits. They just like to look at the costs, or they just like to look at the benefits.

00:44:30.660 They don't weigh them. And they certainly don't say, is there any difference between what you say in

00:44:37.160 public and what you say in private? So I'm seeing lots of no's in the comments. One says, my 80-year-old

00:44:45.220 aunt. Governor Dan Patrick said he would risk dying to keep a strong economy for his grandkids.

00:44:53.680 You know, a lot of the people in their 80s, isn't that the greatest generation? The people who fought in

00:45:00.180 World War II, etc. Oh, somebody's 92-year-old mom had COVID and recovered. Good for her.

00:45:08.880 A friend's uncle.

00:45:12.980 Single 80-year-olds.

00:45:14.420 All right. Just looking at your comments.

00:45:19.520 California passed a new racist law. What the hell is wrong with my state? What a mess. So

00:45:32.280 California passed a law that has an ethnic and gender requirement for boards now. So if you have

00:45:42.740 a corporation with a board, you'll be fined up to $100,000 for not having diversity on your board.

00:45:51.180 Now, do I like diversity? Yes, I do. Yeah, I do like diversity. Is there an advantage to having a

00:45:59.740 diverse corporate board? Yup. Yes, there is an advantage. There's an advantage socially, because

00:46:06.800 you can say you did it. But there's also an advantage in terms of just being able to look

00:46:11.580 through more windows, more points of view. How is that bad? Of course it's good. But should it be a

00:46:19.960 law? Given that a diverse board is unambiguously good for the company itself, and the company would

00:46:29.560 agree with that. If you asked any of these corporations, hey, do you think, you know, just

00:46:34.280 privately, just privately, just, you know, just you and me, do you think privately, it would be

00:46:40.340 better if you had a more diverse board? What would the company, what would the company say? Well, if

00:46:46.080 it's a big company, I think every one of them would say, yeah, you know, it is better. Because first of

00:46:51.700 all, it will take the heat off us. That's good. Second of all, the employees are going to like it,

00:46:58.020 because they want the board to look like them. That's good. Thirdly, our customers are going to

00:47:03.960 like it because they want the company to look, you know, like the public. And fourthly, you're

00:47:10.260 going to get a perspective that you just wouldn't get without it. So of course they want it. But

00:47:17.340 should it be, you should it be, you know, a requirement, a racial requirement? That is racist.

00:47:27.680 There's no other spin on it. If you have a law that requires that some races are okay to put on a 0.99

00:47:36.100 board from now on, and some are not, meaning that the next person you add can't be a, you know,

00:47:41.980 white male, it's just racist. But apparently that'll happen. John Thompson on Twitter, just a Twitter

00:47:54.900 user. John Thompson had this tweet. He said, the violence you see in the streets today is,

00:48:00.420 he calls it woke supremacist, woke supremacist violence. And I thought, yeah, that is what it

00:48:06.900 is. The woke protesters have become sort of a woke supremacist group, because the woke people don't

00:48:16.600 say, I wish you would change the way you're acting. They say you, you suck, right? The woke people do

00:48:25.540 believe, literally believe that they're superior to people that they would consider less woke. So

00:48:31.860 isn't that a supremacist thing? If you think you're better than the other people, that's what that is,

00:48:37.300 right? Um, well, there we go. So I don't know where we're heading with all this stuff, but it does

00:48:48.160 seem that the, uh, uh, all of the racial and ethnic and gender stuff, there's sort of a logical place

00:48:58.300 that it all ends up, which is failure. Because if you're focusing on that, you can't really solve

00:49:05.460 it. Because you can never really get to the point where, you know, you've got the right balance and

00:49:10.180 everybody's happy. Since it's not possible to make everybody happy, uh, you have to find some balance

00:49:17.300 of trying hard enough that you're trying to make things better, but you haven't destroyed the whole

00:49:22.720 system. And I don't know how, how that happens. Um, all right. So that's where we're at today.

00:49:35.700 I would expect that the, uh, next two debates, you would see Trump do better. Uh, one of the reasons

00:49:45.240 that Trump will do better is because for whatever reason, the incumbent doesn't do well in the first

00:49:51.040 debate. It's a weird, a weird kind of pattern. And I can't convince myself that there's a reason for

00:49:57.980 it, except maybe being president is too different from debating and presidents maybe have overconfidence.

00:50:04.980 I don't know. Uh, but, uh, I would expect him to do much better. And what is more important,

00:50:12.060 the debate that's closer to the election or the one that goes first? Well, experts say the first

00:50:18.420 debate seems to be important, but I would argue that the one that is closest to election day would

00:50:23.180 be the most important. Um, yeah, my air quality today is unbreathable. So I'm locked in the house

00:50:32.040 again. Once again, I'm in house arrest in my house. Um, oh, let me say one more thing about the, uh,

00:50:41.800 California law about the boards. So the, the boards will be required to add, uh, ethnic and gender

00:50:49.200 diversity. But here's the funny part. Uh, you can self-describe. So apparently you're allowed to

00:50:57.980 self-identify anything you want. So how many corporate boards are just going to say, Hey,

00:51:05.040 does anybody want to self-identify as, uh, Hawaiian, Hawaiian native or something? Anybody want to be

00:51:11.580 Native American? And somebody will say, well, I hadn't thought about it before, but I'll, I'll

00:51:16.620 self-identify. Then you're all set. Um, yeah, the next, the next debate, apparently they're talking

00:51:25.880 about cutting off the microphones. Uh, the one thing that, uh, I think is hilarious about the first

00:51:32.180 debate is given the way that they organized it with these two minutes, you get to talk and the

00:51:38.260 other person doesn't get to rebut. If the other person doesn't get to rebut, they're going to talk

00:51:44.100 over you. So whoever designed that first debate, they got exactly what they designed. It was designed

00:51:51.700 to give you just what you saw, especially because president Trump was part of it. If you design a system

00:51:59.260 where somebody can talk over you and then you say, okay, I got this system where you could, you know,

00:52:05.780 there's nothing that would stop them really except the moderator and he can't really stop them. Uh, and then

00:52:11.060 we're going to add president Trump into it. What the hell do you expect? Right? So I'm not sure that this

00:52:17.900 whole debate thing even works. Doesn't seem to have any, any real point to it. I will say that I am, uh,

00:52:25.740 surprised and a little bit impressed that Joe Biden got up the day after the debate and still had a,

00:52:33.020 looks like a fully functional day. So whatever it is that's that Biden is experiencing. And I feel

00:52:40.980 like it's unambiguously true that he's declining and it's very noticeable. That just feels completely

00:52:47.660 true. Uh, but he does have good periods. Will that be enough? We'll find out. Oh yes. Uh, I was going

00:52:56.860 to talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse thing. So apparently, uh, Biden has referred to Kyle Rittenhouse

00:53:03.460 in a tweet. He's, he tweeted a picture of him and referred to him as a white supremacist.

00:53:08.900 And in so doing made Kyle Rittenhouse a rich man because, uh, Kyle Rittenhouse has a good lawyer,

00:53:18.140 Lin Wood, who has already said he's going to sue. Um, I think he's going to sue the media,

00:53:24.420 some part of some part of the media and also Joe Biden for slandering his client. Now, do you think

00:53:32.040 he'll win? Yes. I would think this would be the, the world's easiest lawsuit is, you know,

00:53:42.040 cause they're the evidence of the slander is in a tweet. The, the evidence that Biden should have

00:53:48.240 known that Kyle Rittenhouse had no connection with white supremacy whatsoever. There's no evidence.

00:53:54.600 When I say no evidence, I mean, none, there is, there's nothing suggesting it. There's nothing

00:54:01.060 hinting at it. There's nothing there. He is nothing, but a good guy who found himself in a bad

00:54:10.180 situation. You could argue that he made a mistake being there with a gun and I would not debate that,

00:54:16.220 but he's a good person apparently. And, uh, I think Lin Wood is just going to sue the living crap out of, 0.98

00:54:25.160 uh, Joe Biden. And I'm going to be pretty happy about that.

00:54:31.060 If he gets away with it, uh, maybe I can get Lin Wood to sue some of the people on Twitter who,

00:54:37.580 who call me bad things.

00:54:41.640 Um, so how much do you like the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse probably is going to be a millionaire?

00:54:49.420 Looks like it to me. All right. That's all for now. And I will talk to you tomorrow.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - October 01, 2020

Episode 1141 Scott Adams： What We Will Remember From Debate, How the Republic Could Collapse, Rittenhouse Slander

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